I know I’ve been doing consistent updates for Wonder Woman, but I wanted to pause for a moment to shine a light on a different holdover movie. Because producer Will Packer and director Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls Trip just had a terrific second-weekend hold. The Universal/Comcast Corp. release (penned by Erica Rivinoja, Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver) earned $20.086 million in its second weekend, dropping just 36% from its $31m debut last week. That brings the $20m comedy’s ten-day total to $65.5m. So, it took a while, but 2017 finally has a real break-out comedy smash.

It is one thing to say that it’s a good hold. But that’s a lower drop than (deep breath) Bad Moms (-41%), The Other Woman (-41%) Think Like A Man (-47%), Ride Along (-48%), Boo!: A Madea Halloween (-39%). It’s that “better than Bad Moms” drop that’s really impressing me (maybe Jada Pinkett Smith should be in every female-centric ensemble comedy). But even a run like the Tyler Perry film gets it to $87m, and Boo! sank like a stone after Halloween. It has already passed Think Like A Man Too ($65m) and The Wedding Ringer ($64m) and will become Lee’s biggest domestic earner in a few days when it passes The Best Man Holiday ($70m in 2013).

I’m not remotely ready to argue that it will leg it like Bad Moms (or Bridesmaids which fell just 20% in its first two weekends), but this is clearly not a one-weekend-wonder, with $65 million in ten days. The Regina Hall/Queen Latifah/Jada Pinkett Smith/Tiffany Haddish comedy caper earned strong reviews and a deluge of positive buzz heading into and right after its $31m debut weekend, and it will remain the only thing of its kind until… uh… A Bad Moms Christmas in mid-November I suppose. If it merely plays like The Other Woman from this juncture onward, we’re looking at a better-than-Bad Moms $115m domestic total.

But if it goes the distance, and really the film is clearly playing well to adult women (of all races) and not a few adult men (of all races) as well. It’s an old-school party movie, with likable and funny folks going on mostly positive adventures and coming out better for it on the other side. Unlike Snatched or Rough Night (both of which I enjoyed/will defend), this female-led comedy didn’t penalize its protagonists for trying to have fun. And yeah, for folks not used to seeing the likes of Hall and Latifah in outright leading roles in a mainstream comedy like this, Girls Trip is a true event movie.

It will be ironic/fitting/etc. if the only too real breakout comedies this year turn out to be Girls Trip, Boo 2: A Madea Halloween, A Bad Moms Christmas, and Pitch Perfect 3, although to be fair it’s hard not to see Daddy’s Home 2 doing at least well (if not as well as the first film) in November. The current mentality is one that saw STX Entertainment reacting to the success of the first Bad Moms by initially green lighting Bad Dads before giving us a Bad Moms sequel. But after this year, maybe the lesson of Bridesmaids will finally set in.

But the lesson of Girls Trip is simple (if potentially simplistic): Adult women like to see movies where other adult women get to have enjoyable and free-spirited comedic adventures and become closer friends/better people as a result. The world is too grim for women (and humanity in general) at this moment to find much value in a movie where women suffer for our laughs, even if I would still argue that Rough Night and Snatched deserved better fates. And yeah, if Hollywood decides to react to this success by essentially giving us a Hispanic version of Girls Trip an Asian version of Girls Trip and so-forth, well, I’d watch the hell out of every single one of them. And I imagine plenty of other folks of all stripes would too.

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